First Comment from New Zealand! Readers are directed to check out Kurt Vonnegut's classic short story "Harrison Bergeron" for understanding of the down side of creating a society with the leveling principle run amok. In this dystopia, everyone is controlled by a state apparatus run by the "Handicapper General", Diana Moon Glampers. Equality of every sort is enforced. Not just economic equality, but equality of intellect, appearance, and athletic ability is kept at the lowest possible level by requiring the gifted to be burdened by devices to handicap their abilities.

The fact is, that some people have more talents than others, and some people are more industrious than others. Every functional society rewards these people for their disproportionate contributions by gifts of social rank - not necessarily economic. Honorific titles, a bow or curtsy, a warm place by the fire could be enough. In New Zealand, decades of social engineering have destroyed social rank entirely. The firefighter, the doctor, the teacher, receive nothing but disrespect from the army of social beneficiaries. In addition, the discretionary income of people on the dole can exceed the after tax income of professionals. Plus the dole recipients have leisure time and are free from any responsibility.

Small surprise that 1/4th of the people born in New Zealand (the most talented and productive 1/4th) has emigrated. So be careful what you ask for, a society of equals is not such a good thing.

Good questions, but this is not an adequate statement: "Equality is a function of population, social status aspirations and resources."

Equality/inequality is also a function of institutional design and established past results, a.k.a. class structure.

Whatever role there might be for manipulating/discussing values as a way of altering our world's extreme patterns of inequality, the sheer fact is that nobody in charge of any major institution is going to let this topic be addressed in a substantial way in front of a substantial audience. The rich are fantastically rich, and are thoroughly convinced they deserve it all as the just and proper outcome of a rational, optimal, Panglossian social order (it's certainly been Panglossian for them). Take a look at the polling data on this (which you can access via Sam Pizzigati's website). And the vested interests are utterly intent on staying where they are in society and in relationship to the distribution of comforts and pains.

And the fact also remains that, whatever people's values are, capitalism is a system that is ruthlessly and competitively dedicated to promoting the culture of acquisition and possession and the endless expansion of trivial (and ecocidal) creature comforts.

So, I submit that this is not a matter of technical adjustments. It's a matter of politics.

P.S. Speaking of Veblen, you might take a look at his more substantial work, which came after The Theory of the Leisure Class, which was itself his first book. He got way deeper thereafter, but nobody bothers to look. Gee, I wonder why...

1) We can't. We won't. Any "knowledge" gained in the "neurosciences" will be used to dominate people. It is in our genes, and that is a force of nature you/we can't stop. Like trying to stop a hurricane. Know thyself.

2) There will be no "future US society". We will fracture (along bioregional boundaries with any luck) and we will be lucky to avoid a prolonged, violent civil war - just lucky not smart. If anything "neuroscience" will make things worse in unpredictable ways.

3) The debt/financial "crisis" is more one of perception than reality. The "crisis" is currently being use to increase social inequity and concentration of wealth into the hands of a few. We have a longage of critters problem here, not a shortage of resources/"finances"

4) Change "our" status? No. Whats this "we"?

5) are you serious? Who is your audience? "Aspirations"???? You know - for alot of us all we want to do is die in peace and without much pain.

Good luck, man.

I haven't studied this subject the way Nate has, but my impression that rank within a profession really isn't as important for women as men (or at least married women with children).

There are a whole host of things women can excel at:

1. Highest paid in their profession.
2. Best in their profession (best teacher, best nurse, best piano teacher, best analyst).
3. Best behaved children.
4. Having children who "turn out" well.
5. Highest paid husband.
6. Best cook.
7. Cleanest house.
8. Outstanding volunteer at school or church.
9. Most nicely decorated house.
10. Most organized.
11. Best at a sport.
12. Most successful garden.

Since there are a lot of things married women with children can excel at, they don't have to choose to compete in every arena. I know as an actuary I purposely chose what many would consider the "mommy track''--working fewer hours, spending more time with my family, turning down moves around the country or overseas that would have gotten me more money or rank. I might have been best in some ways, but not the highest paid. We never wanted the biggest house, or fanciest car, so we always had plenty of money for charity, and to put in the bank.

I think as we go forward, the world will change, and more people will find diverse ways to compete, instead of always worrying about who has the most money. Maybe they can compete at having the nicest garden, or the best seed saved for next year. Also, remember my post about Gift Economies. In such economies, people compete for how much they can give away, rather than how much they have.

Hey, a real Nate campfire post! Cool!

I'll throw an initial 2 cents in, though I'll warn in advance that this has been an insomniac week for me - not that unusual - so it'll take the form of a first-person ramble.

I find that visualizing a screaming capuchin monkey hurling his food because it thinks another monkey got a better deal, is a fun and apt way to characterize much of the core human socio-political dynamic. Indeed, to a good first approximation it might be considered the whole story.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/09/0917_030917_monkeyfairne...
Brosnan said the response to the unequal treatment was astonishing: Capuchins who witnessed unfair treatment and failed to benefit from it often refused to conduct future exchanges with human researchers, would not eat the cucumbers they received for their labors, and in some cases, hurled food rewards at human researchers.

Once one recognizes this within oneself (and it ain't subtle), it is entirely possible to just mentally disengage from it as a silly, even insane, way to see the world. Whenever one feels it trying to creep into one's worldview again, laughter is called for. The exception (IMO) can be utilizing it to temporarily bring rogue brain modules inline with one another for a project which requires coordinated focus across several different sorts of thinking.

It is clearly absolute, and not relative, wealth which directly bears on our security and well-being. This "duh-level" realization freed me long ago to detach myself from concerns over relative wealth & status and live on a pittance (by USA standards) over the decades, while employing any money or status which fell my way to get larger projects done, often semi-anonymously. It's a sort of freedom hiding in plain sight, available to anyone.

Ironically and unexpectedly, this detachment brought me into frequent contact with many considered ultra-wealthy or ultra-high-status; and it was generally them approaching me and not the other way around. (Indeed, in some cases this status inversion reached bizarro-world levels of surreality, but it was all consistent with the initial realization and resulting worldview).

It's a little like going through life with a vision problem - as I did until 7th grade - and then suddenly getting glasses. A whole range of handicaps you'd been unaware of drops away. Run, Forrest, run.

Those who've seen my posts here - fringy even for an eclectic group like TOD readers - may also recall that I can shift in and out of "human" perspective a bit, and at least half the time I think of humans as an alien would - as just another species, albeit a problematic one I have some fondness for.

To those who'd like to test the view from that perspective, just imagine the question seriously posed as to whether or not nuts are distributed fairly for the squirrels of the world. I think a common response might well be "WTF cares except the squirrels?" And the answer is, indeed, that pretty much nobody but the squirrels care, and they're stuck with the real world.

And from the point view of life on earth now and into the future, the answer is the same for humans. It's grossly incongruous to imagine that such matters as the wealth distribution - particularly the relative wealth distribution, and most particularly the abstract relative wealth distribution - are important in any way at all, much less comparable in importance to the ongoing health of the world's life-systems. Yet that is the way we tacitly treat them. Good thing the squirrels don't have nuclear weapons, (though I suppose a reasonable case could be made for transferring the launch codes to them instead of humans).

But let's not imagine that squirrels, or any species ever, haven't had unequal wealth. The very nature of evolution assures that some are phenotypically wealthier, and thus usually absolutely wealthier, in any given context than others; the strong will tend to defend the best nut trees. Luck outside the phenotype also plays a large role. And the nut trees themselves have unequal wealth, some growing strong in deep soil with abundant water, and others in worse areas. Unequal wealth is one dimension of the oft-fractal character of life. It isn't broken and we can't fix it for long.

This is not offered as a rationale for selfishness; I have given my wealth and status away and will continue to when it falls to me. Rather, I suggest it as one way a hypothetical mature intelligent race might possibly look at things.

Since this is a bit of a ramble, I'll note that at this moment I'm recalling a bit from the intro to Goldman's The Princess Bride: And I remember once we were having iced tea on the Neisser porch and talking and just outside the porch was their badminton court and I was watching some kids play badminton and Ed had just shellacked me, and as I left the court for the porch, he said, "Don't worry, it'll all work out, you'll get me next time" and I nodded, and then Ed said, "And if you don't, you'll beat me at something else."

I went to the porch and sipped iced tea and Edith was reading this book and she didn't put it down when she said, "That's not necessarily true, you know."

I said, "How do you mean?"

And that's when she put her book down. And looked at me. And said it: "Life isn't fair, Bill. We tell our children that it is, but it's a terrible thing to do. It's not only a lie, it's a cruel lie. Life is not fair, and it never has been, and it's never going to be." Would you believe that for me right then it was like one of those comic books where the light bulb goes on over Mandrake the Magician's head?

"It isn't!" I said, so loud I really startled her. "You're right! It's not fair." I was so happy if I'd known how to dance, I'd have started dancing. "Isn't that great, isn't it terrific?" I think along here Edith must have thought I was well on my way to being bonkers.

But it meant so much to me to have it said and out and free and flying - that was the discontent I had endured the night my father stopped reading, I realized right then. That was the reconciliation I was trying to make and couldn't.

And that's what I think this book's about. All those Columbia experts can spiel all they want about the delicious satire; they're crazy. This book says, "life's not fair" and I'm telling you, one and all, you better believe it.

One of the biggest impediments I have often seen to effective advocacy for the planet is the unquestioned, even unconscious egalitarian imperative. The belief that perfect fairness for individual humans now existing is not only the chief imperative, but a prerequiste and absolute limiting condition for any sort of mitigation or adaptation goals which might be sought by humans. This, of course, drastically shrinks the list of acceptable goals; and the list shrinks still further when one adds that only egalitarian methods are acceptable ways of attaining them. We are attempting to run a world based on an unconscious knee-jerk heuristic evolved for efficient life in a small tribe, and we're running it into the ground.

As individuals, we can "just say no" to this trenchant inborn idiosyncracy, opt out of an idiot game and become citizens of the planet. There's no reason to think this will spontaneously catch on in a big way, though, because it feels good to be righteously pissed off about inequality. It is the all-purpose human motivation, the rationalization of a thousand uses. Look inside and get to know it, it's enjoyable and we thrive on it. Powerful, the dark side is. Learn to see it all around you. Control it, and you can use it to focus your mind; submit to it, and it controls you. And others, variously motivated, will use that fact to call your dance tune without your ever realizing you have no tune of your own.

So the moral is, eat the damn cucumber and keep a sense of humor even when the other monkeys are getting grapes. Embrace unfairness and inequality as an aspect of reality, because it certainly isn't going away. And be kind to those around you, while bearing in mind that we are just one species out of many and in overshoot to boot.

so there's a saturday-afternoon ramble; cheers.

Cliff Klingenhagen had me in to dine
With him one day; and after soup and meat,
And all the other things there were to eat,
Cliff took two glasses and filled one with wine
And one with wormwood. Then, without a sign
For me to choose at all, he took the draught
Of bitterness himself, and lightly quaffed
It off, and said the other one was mine.

And when I asked him what the deuce he meant
By doing that, he only looked at me
And smiled, and said it was a way of his.
And though I know the fellow, I have spent
Long time a-wondering when I shall be
As happy as Cliff Klingenhagen is.

- Edwin Arlington Robinson

Regarding the rich, I don't see them as much of a problem in the real physical world. Most of their wealth is a fantasy which exists only in cyberspace. Their carbon footprints are probably only slightly higher than the middle class of the developed world. They probably eat less than average people in developed counties and have fewer children. Their imaginary wealth (digits in computers) might still be harnessed to fund building a post carbon infrastructure.

On the other hand, the social welfare/criminal class of New Zealand is a rapidly growing population, and they all drive cars, as do their teenaged children, licensed or not. They have no interest in pursuing (free!) education to learn careers that would contribute to building a post carbon infrastructure. In the real world, they contribute to crowding in the housing market, on the motorways, and have made public places and schools unsafe.

The minister said 345,000 New Zealanders currently receive a benefit, costing taxpayers $4.8 billion a year.

This in a tiny nation of 4 million!

Take a look at the recent political wrangling related to how to pay for health care and who gets health care and who does not.
Sorry to quote favorite songs so much, but here is a line from one of Leonard Cohen's songs.

"Everybody knows."

and a bit more....

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died

Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows.....

Yes, something is rank indeed. We define ourselves and our situation in terms that are not tools by which we can bring about peace and equity.

We use conventions -- freedom, free market, socialist, communist, democracy, terrorist, freedom fighter, AntiChrist, Christ, Satan -- and so forth. These words are made to elicit "fight or flight" emotions of raw, wordless rage and fear.

The notion of equity is a quaint relic of the past and now is only used to manipulate people into compliance with the agenda of keeping the rabble in line for as long as the rabble is a useful pool of resources.

Our leaders make a big deal -- often believing it themselves -- that we are good and are helping others --from the poor in this countrey to the poor around the world. We (USA) spend far, far more on weapons and we sell more weapons around the world than we do anything else.

If famine, drought, and disease does not get rid of enough people, we are arming the world so that "you and him" can fight. When many are dead and those left are too short of resources to survive it is easier to manage people as a throw away resource.

Status is gained -- whether we like it or not -- by being the most calculating, rapacious, and cruel member of any given society. William Catton calls ours "the pick pocket culture." That is, most of us try to sneak around geting more of the goodies than is good for us. Those who are "successful" are those at the top of the heap of grasping humans. We've actually set up our political systems and our business laws to hold down the poor and to enable the wealthy and powerful to draw more wealth and power from others.

This does not end well. We destroy that which gives us life in the process of competing for domination.

There are other songs about this....

But Nate -- you have lots of status here for contributing so well and so often to the stimulating discussion. Thanks for doing this rather than trying to become a clone of Rupert Murdoch or Madoff.

Nice to see you writing again, Nate. Hope your thesis is going well.

I have little empathy with the issues you discuss. Of course status seeking and making money is common currency. But it's never been very important to me. In fact, it is basically undetectable among just about everyone I know. You appear to have emerged from that very unhappy world only recently. Well, better late than never. I've never lived in it. Lots of people have never lived in it, probably always a relatively small minority. But still, lots of people. Does that make us something other than human? I don't think so.

Your questions are too tough for me. I don't have any idea how to "come up with a creative, not-too-disruptive plan where energy descent is paired with aspiration descent?" Conspicuous consumption goes away when the money goes away, doesn't it?

Who you are is who you think you are. Time is our personal accounting, our narrative of our experience. Try to figure out when you hear your footfall in the dry grass. Always past tense. So, ego, our personal accounting, gives us the notion of sequential events and that is what we call time, only a construct that comes from our head. Without a personal log, the notion of passing time becomes more difficult, when we die, the clock quits ticking. But, because we are biological, time is marked for us, by at least the beating of our hearts, a past tense sequence (we do after all call the heart "the ticker"). Because I am biological I can't step out of time.

So, the really rich guy who dropped dead last week no longer has a beating heart and is now just rotting biological matter. The nice car, nice house, big bank account means nothing to him, because he's gone, although his heirs appreciate his industry while among the living. Make a list of what and who you are. Take your time, write down everything, your whole life's history, all the detail you can recall. You'll fill up a dozen legal pads. When you've got all you can, put it on the shelf for six months and forget it. When you reread your history, your accounting of your life, you will likely be struck by the fact that you are nothing but a past tense description. You're just words, and they mean nothing for the right now, no reality, just past tense description. All that you are is "right now" and that little bit of you is instantly past tense. You will never again be intimidated, awed, or flummoxed by an over achiever. Set your pads on fire and watch them burn. Now, you'll be free to dance how ever you like, whatever the tune.

If making money is what rings your bell, go for it. If you'd rather garden, be a gardener, or a writer, or a farmer, or a shoemaker, or a seamstress.

Lots of folks aren't happy because they never figure out what it is that they want to be (the source of status conflict). Once you've got it figured, it's easy, but, you've got to get it first. And, you have to understand the trap that ego can be. To waste one's life with meaningless pursuit for the cause of status, or ego, is tragedy. Best from the Fremont where last fall's manure is thawing in the pastures.

We need a "Society of Sloth."

The term comes from the guy who started "Die Off" (Jay Hansen?) and denotes a society that is fairly slow, oriented to local foods and culture. We need less material stuff and we do not have the resources to consume as much energy and stuff as we once did -- we have brought ourselves to the brink of extinction with overconsumption.

We need to remember another thing: we are all freeloaders. Mother earth does not owe any of us another breathe of air, another sip of water, or another bite to eat.

Again, we are all free-loaders.

Our stories of status are lies -- false plumage. The real deal is that we have quite proudly destroyed most of the planet as though we declared war on it.

I think that life would be better if we recognise that we are all freeloaders, and that we need to take it easy.

Well done MicroHydro, perpetuating the beneficiary bashing myths of New Zealand's National Party elite. Let's associate all beneficiaries with criminals. Let's assume that all of them are secretly living the good life at your expense. Let's paint the lot with the taint of the one bad apple/example that you can trot out.

There is no doubt that there are those who game the system. They will always be there. They are far fewer in number than your government cares to admit. Your implication that a more equal system is the root cause of New Zealand's ills is not supported by the facts. New Zealand is the fourth worst country in the OECD for inequality, and all the ills you complain of are linked to inequality, not any 'social engineering'.

I for one like Daly's suggestion that limiting the income multiplier to 100 would allow the natural social strata to occur without the ills brought about by huge income disparities. Communism is a distopia. So is Capitalism. We need to find the sensible middle ground.

I am a proud, hard working New Zealander, and intend remaining so.

A complete stranger came up to me in Perth and called me "Freak".
She was right.
I like it.

We convert 10 units of oil energy into 1 unit of food energy.
This has enabled us to grow the population from 1.1 billion to 6.7 billion.
And now supply cannot keep up with demand.
Guess what happens next.

Normal won't cut the mustard.

Myself I am some kind of atheist but I have a growing recognition for religion as a comfort and a tool for social engineering. Humans seems to need to believe in something and religion is efficinet for getting things done, good things or bad things.

I got a suspicion that the socialist movement in Sweden to a large degree filled the same needs as the lutherane church. That could explain some of their spectacular political success in the 1960:s. I dont know what faiths now influence large parts of the population, its probably tough to see the forest when all of the trees are hindering the view. We got the old socialists who still think its 1965 or 1975. We got oddly convinced greens, animal right activists and feminists that think within a very small box. We got people who love consumption and people who feel that society ove to support them with free money. But most people are not extreme.

We have some new christians and a fairly large number of newly arrived christians and muslims but classical religion is not a political force in Sweden. This is probably a large difference to the US.

I get the impression that these threads and a large part of the green movement wish for some kind of spiritual awakening where people suddenly start doing the right things. I dont think that will happen but a multitude of good gradual changes ought to be possible, I only have to observe the good things being done and imagine 5% more each year.

Perhaps one thing thats missing from your article is time.

I'm slowly realizing as I decouple from the main stream that simple time becomes my most precious resource. To do with as I will. Certainly I have less money to use as my time increases. However I really need to relearn how to enjoy time without money.

I'm starting to get the knack of it however I think that most people simply don't correctly value their precious time on this earth. I know I don't and I'm starting to increasingly realize my whole value stream was off.

And this is not about being a hard worker or being lazy etc I realize now that a lot of people are simply wrong about working hard. Its stupid. Perhaps people will find that offensive but honestly its really stupid in the end to work your ass off day in and day out.

Thats not to say working is wrong but it needs to be done in balance against other uses of your time. Do I work full time or grow a large garden and cut my "work" load ?

Perhaps instead of work its better to use the term labor. Yes you have to and should labor to take care of yourself however once you have labored enough to meet your basic needs food clothing shelter your not laboring your working and it must be balanced against time.

Good to see Nate is as irrelevant as ever. Anyone else find themselves wishing he would just start his own behavioral science blog and go do his pointless, rambling, academic monologues there instead?

I especially like the part at the end where he admonishes his readers not to think of anything as being "inevitable or frightening". Oh, gosh no, nothing the least bit inevitable OR frightening about the ongoing slow motion train wreck that is global ecological overshoot and the collapse of industrial civilization.

God forbid we should even speak of it!

Cheers,
Jerry

Before sticking his pig, a kind farmer might stun Porky with a blow to the head so that he is insensible to what happens next.

It seems that the same thing has happened to the majority of the population.

It is wrong to rouse them from their stupor.

Nate, good to see you back. Hope the thesis went well.

That's a nice pic of the Ohakune Carrot - ironic that MicroHydro didn't spot it.

You sure ask some curly ones -- this is my fourth attempt at a response. My first three were full of jargon like (social) cohesion and (social) mobility. In the end, though, I'll just go with some simple-minded answers.

1. How can we use our increasing understanding of status, resources, and the neuroscience of human behavior to influence/create a more benign future?

Science fiction has speculated on this - Bruce Sterling's Distraction, for example, describes a mechanism. The idea is making 'reputation points' an alternative currency.

2. Competition with con-specifics is part of our heritage. But so is cooperation and empathy. What level of wealth disparity would be healthy and/or tolerable for future of US society?

The short answer is "any level". Provided the people in the different groups can be persuaded that the world is as it should be. The problem is not wealth disparity per se, it's people's beliefs about it. Taking your idea about the 10% and 90% a bit further: if everyone accepts and ignores the fact that one social group has a life expectancy of 35 years, while another has 85 years -- that's just how life is -- then you don't have a problem. (It's just those pesky intellectuals you have to keep an eye on... )

3. How might the debt/financial crisis be an opportunity towards making headway on issues of social equity, both within the United States, and between the United States and other, less well off countries?

It won't be. No. No, I can't see any way. Hard times concentrate wealth, because the already-wealthy can weather hard times better than the poor (contrary to your idea that the USA's Gini coefficient will fall). Neither the Capitalist Party or the Other Capitalist Party (as Dmitri Orlov calls them) are at all interested in redistribution - giving everybody a stake in society.

4. Any good ideas on how to change our status/aspiration metric away from conspicuous consumption?

Ideas? Yes. Effective, probably. Morally repugnant, though. What kind of "good" were you thinking of? (Rhetorical question)

5. Can you think of creative ways to downsize your own aspirations by changing social groups?

Like you, I've been eating my capital for the last few years. Only income has been a few hundred dollars in interest. So, not really.

There you are. You asked; I answered. I don't the answers, though.

Nate, you said earlier:
It seems to me that the government continues to at least attempt to level the playing field ... Increasingly the government trough is making up a larger % ...

Isn't this exactly the process Joseph Tainter described? Every problem is met by an attempt to "manage" it. This inevitably consumes more of the civilization's resources. The problem of increasing resource scarcity is approached the same way, with the result being a downward spiral.

It will take a government of systems thinkers to break the pattern. And that's less likely than ... a very unlikely event indeed.

I have a scheme I am working on currently. So far I call it the Localization Projects Fund.

The basic premise is that the percentage of the population that has benefited the most from our little consumer capitalism experiment, those who currently hold much of the wealth and equity that was attainable via cheap almost free energy, need to finance the re-localization of infrastructure for the next generations.

We will provide a venue for donations of money, equipment, materials, supplies, real estate, whatever, and put it all directly to work for the transition. It is definitely redistribution of wealth although we won't market as such.

Don't know how successful it will be but at this point ..... it's all I got left.

"Equality" came into vogue only after human slaves were replaced by oil slaves, as that's reversed, fewer will have the luxury to fret over who has the newer jet ski.

Time magazine had an article on ten trends of the next decade, http://tinyurl.com/yeosbhk

"The cultural battle lines of our time, with red America pitted against blue, will be scrambled as Buddhist vegan militia members and evangelical anarchist squatters trade tips on how to build self-sufficient vertical farms from scrap-heap materials."

I like it because a) it is a description of family-level change I've seen growing in the many blogs about dropping out, b) although the Energy Fairy is prominent in this version, with a few tweaks she is less important, and c) it's all about a re-negotiated lifestyle with less emphasis on grabbing the ring and more on enjoying the ride.

I keep wondering if the issue isn't so much "equality" as "trashed expectations".

One of the pervading myths of our society is that we can all get to the top, from log cabin to presidency, etc, or if not the top, at least a bit further up the pile, helped in part by the crumbs from the profligate rich man's table.

The realities of resource crunches, be they financial, material, or ecological, trash that myth completely.

But we still cling to it.

And therein lies the problem. Or one of the problems.

Social and wealth equality is a dangerous dream. In such a scenario, the societal entropy is at a maximum. We know what is means in physics when one day the universe achieves this state. There is no energy or information flowing anymore. It is the ultimate death. Same with such a society. There is no potential between people, such as love, no desire, no interest in work, no innovation, no rewards. Why would one if all is equal.

Luckily, the masses, religious as they may be, do not follow the Jesus parables and sayings in the New Testament condemning the rich and elevating the poor: “A poor man will easier go through a needle’s oar than a rich man to heaven”. The fundamental in this text is to make all people equal and share the wealth.

We had a good try with communism but it failed for many reason, one being that there was no incentive for better work performance or innovation. In the DDR a widespread custom was to take 2 jackets to work. The spare one was hung over the chair to pretend one is at work and then one took off “shopping” to stand in line for a rare article such as oranges. This could be done because there were only 2 basic salary levels (1980): 1,100 Mark for teachers, police, government officials, etc and 800 Mark for workers such as factory workers, garbage collectors, etc., with some variations for hard or dangerous work. Hence, the equality in one salary level stifled personal involvement in work. Same with pensions. 800 Mark for those salary level 1 workers and 400 Mark for the others.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Gorbachev said that Communism is a good idea but not workable on this planet.

Anyone who thinks that status doesn't matter is living in a different universe. I have lived this from both perspectives and it has come back to bite me. I started with my first little dose of reality when I broke my left upper front tooth. For $35 you could get a gold crown or for $80 you could get porcelain over gold. Needless to say I got AU. Children at about nine years of age can be tremendously cruel to one another. There was a little girl named Cynthia Hicks that had a case of Polio. She was derided mercilessly because of this to the point that I truly would rather them pick on me so she could get respite from their constant goading that she was not the typical Texas beauty. I if course finally got the money to replace my tooth and lost eighty pounds which made all the difference in my perception and therefore my treatment by others. We now see our peers sliding down the scale of social perception and await our turn until we are swept away by the credit crunch or whatever fate will finally take away our way of life. My children think I am overzealous in my ways of preparation for this even though I have told them this is but another form of insurance for this inevitability or possibility, whatever your take on things. I personally don't see any way out for our society ultimately but am unsure of the timing of the implosion. Are there any others that feel that this will be a fast decline or will it be a slow but inevitable slide caused by cascading cross defaults caused by whatever impetus. This can make a big difference in allowing preparation for the events which lead time will make.
Regards,
Jim Hall

Please view the following as a though experiment, as I am in no way advocating social and economic inequality by any means.

Premise: The greater the socioeconomic inequality, the less total resources a society will consume.

A society consisting of a small wealthy elite plus a large oppressed and impoverished proletariat will consume less total energy and other physical resources than a society in which all the goodies are distributed more or less equally.

Why? Consider for example that while an oligarch's top-of-the-line Bentley may cost as much as 20 mini-cars, he cannot reasonably do 20 times the amount of driving or consume 20 times the amount of fuel. This is particularly true if most of the proletariat don't even own cars, like in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the Cold War years. I suspect that Stalin's USSR had a very small per capita personal energy consumption.

Ditto for air travel. It is of course extremely wasteful to hop around the world on a personal jet. But if you are one of the privileged few doing air travel, then the total amount of fuel consumed as the result of your air travel will be less than that of thousands of college kid flying down to Cancun on spring break. They will of course no longer be in college but rather will be toiling at hard labor, such as harvesting crops on someone else's land.

While outrageously extravagant and expensive, Versailles + the peasant hovels in the surrounding countryside probably consumed far less resources than if single-family modern houses were built for the same amount of people.

I hope it is clear where this line of thinking is going. And that is, in terms of resource consumption there could be certain advantages to having more rather than less inequality. And I think the driving forces pushing things in that direction are already at play in the US, and this may just be the beginning. Of course the formerly comfortable middle class will not take kindly to becoming peasants, and therein lies the potential for some serious ugliness. Stability will likely only be restored through a brutal dictatorial police state. I see it sort of going like this: Equality => Inequality => Social Instability => Totalitarian Oppression.

A corollary is that a free and open society cannot exist in an environment of permanent resource shortages and fierce competition for same. Or said another way, if the pie gets smaller, the big guys will take the same size piece as before, the difference being that the little guys will be sharing the smaller amount of what remains. Daimler Benz and BMW still do a thriving business in many dirt-poor third-world countries.

Take a good look at that map. Some how the fundamentalist christians of the deep South don't care much about the poor around them. The meaning of God's will on Earth means bashing gays and murdering doctors who perform abortions. Feeding the hungry and caring for the sick doesn't fit in with the few Bible verses that are repeatedly pounded into them.
The best GINI score is Mormon Utah which was founded on the radical idea that no one deserves to die simply because they are poor. The elimination of poverty is central to the doctrine of Zion by which they mean creating God's kingdom on Earth.
As for New York's darkness it could be explained by the financial shenanigans of Wall St by the irreligious brokers and bankers.

I was originally on the college track. Received a BA in Psychology. Went 'back to the land' in the early 70s. Got a job on home construction crew. Worked at that for 20 odd years including getting a contractor's license, electrical, plumbing, running heavy equipment, etc. with a bit of farming on the side to make some extra money. Then, as the old body began to wear out, got a degree in computer science and had a 16 year career in that.

I've lived with my foot in two worlds, in a manner of speaking, blue collar and white collar and have studied attitudes of these and various other 'classes'. When working in the 'blue collar' world, I was impressed with the general honesty and willingness to work hard that these folks have. I was also impressed by their conviction that people who work with their hands for a living are the real honest people of the world, deserving of the most respect. On the 'lower' side, deserving of less and less respect going down the continuum, are people who are gaming the system by basically being deadbeats and living off of the labor of others such as those misusing disability or other types of welfare. Likewise, going up the scale in the workplace continuum, there are the 'paper shufflers' of the insurance, finance, banking world and so on. These people also deserve less and less respect as their work takes them farther and farther away from being meaningful producers of real goods that benefit society. They also are gaming the system and growing fat living off the labor of others.

So I sympathize somewhat with a few posters here who have decried the 'welfare deadbeat' syndrome but I am strongly of the opinion that the 'paper shufflers' of the world have ripped off the honest working class person orders of magnitude more than the welfare deadbeats, and they have done this in a manner that is, as we speak, bringing society crashing down.

Full disclosure: I developed Parkinson's disease two years ago and am now on Social Security disability. I am grateful for this (meager) income and feel entitled to it, having contributed to the SS system for many years. I would also, if I possibly could, gladly give up the disability and go back to work at some skill that I have.

I'm more intrigued by the map than by all the envy-of-the-better-off whining and whingeing suffusing the page as a whole. The rather modest differences in GINI coefficient don't seem to correlate well with much of anything except the typical wintertime temperature map, which tends to show a broad cold bullseye in the upper Midwest with warmer temps as one goes towards both the coasts and the South. In particular, New York and California, both of which take pride in taxing and regulating almost anything that moves or thinks until it stops moving or thinking (à la Harrison Bergeron), do not seem to have particularly low GINI coefficients. In addition, the People's Republic of Vermont and Live Free or Die New Hampshire seem to fall neatly together into the same low-ish GINI bin, which may indicate a weak influence of public policy. I don't have a grand interpretation to propose at the moment but surely there's another Ph.D. thesis or two somewhere in all this.

As for the whining and whingeing, I cavalierly dismiss most of it as placing itself beneath serious consideration by carrying more than a whiff of the self-appointed philosophe with nothing better to do bellyaching on pretended behalf of the not-so-well-off. In that respect, I'm more interested in the behavior of the not-so-well-off than in any airy academic manifestos propounded on their behalf. In particular, when they show themselves to be sufficiently offended by great differences in wealth to, say, drop their costly premium ESPN subscriptions in large numbers and find something of their own to do on a spare Saturday afternoon or Monday night other than to give from their own pockets to make multimullionaires of big stupid steroidally remanufactured beast-men, then I'll reconsider.

"5. Can you think of creative ways to downsize your own aspirations by changing social groups?"

The only one I can answer!

I not only thought about it - I did it. I went from being a (sort of) academic at one of the newer universities in the UK to being a peasant in an out of the way village in Hungary. I most certainly changed my social group.

In the UK my aspirations were to become a lecturer. Several of my colleagues had advanced the same way. I was well on track for doing that when there was a change of management. Ha! Management by living in a ivory tower. At the end of that little interlude I was left in no doubt whatsoever by TPTB that I had no chance whatsoever with my aspirations. So I cut and ran.

My researches into Peal Oil enormously affected my decision. I certainly downsized my aspirations. They are now "Will the crops grow this year?" and "How will I learn to manage goats at my time of life?".

My aspirations to social status here are nil. When I arrived, as a non-Hungarian speaker, I was regarded as an object of curiosity. By stages, and by simply going about what I am trying to do here (and going to the pub daily of an evening) I find that I am no longer an object of curiosity, people know the various problems I have and in the Hungarian way will help if they can. My expectations remain very low - to continue to be able to afford the Internet, to continue to be on good relations with the villagers and, my gods willing (small G and plural deliberate) have enough good health and strength to get on with what I am doing here.

There exists a cold, analytical side to studying income disparity. Check out the work of Yakovenko, or a post I wrote up a few weeks ago. http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com/2010/03/econophysics-and-sunk-costs.html
Income disparity will always exist, as if it was following Boltzmann/Gibbs statistics like just about every other natural statistical phenomenon. Yet, another wild disparity starts diverging at high income levels. As Yakovenko has noted, and I spent some time substantiating, this has a strong dependence on the Wall Street market.
One can say this is also natural, but it is natural like mutations are natural. I say this because the relative abundance of species also follows this wide disparity Pareto law, where mutations are natural. Same thing with the size of companies or or sizes of oil fields. Like I said, the statistics really show the cold hard facts, and its wise to look at these numbers to see where and if changes to the system can be made.

p.s. I get the secondary joke in the title. All income distributions are plotted as rank histograms.

Instead of viewing currency reform and a reshuffling of claims as either inevitable and/or frightening, perhaps we can come up with a creative, not-too-disruptive plan where financial descent is paired with aspiration descent so that energy descent is more manageable.

3. How might the debt/financial crisis be an opportunity towards making headway on issues of social equity, both within the United States, and between the United States and other, less well off countries?

There will always be inequities, but the American system is built to enshrine and emphasize the differences. Any change has to deal with the question of how the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. You have to figure out some sort of equitable way to bill the banks, bankers, and industrialists for the bailouts. So you have to tax the rich...mainly because they have all the money, and they seem to have gotten it from the government.

I suggest a Federal Property Tax.

I'm not suggesting a tax like a municipal property tax. I suggest that your entire net worth- stocks, bonds, real estate, annuities, vehicles, bank deposits- be taxed.

The reasoning behind this is that people with more wealth benefit disproportionately from government services- the police, the military, the courts, and international relations, for example. So you strip a little off the top each year for services used by the owner. After all, if your country is invaded, the rich have more to lose. They should pay for the stability of the country and the protection of the military and police.

This would be in addition to current taxes, though things like income tax might be tweaked and you might want a minimum net worth threshold (say $350,000) and a progressive rate. Maybe a reduced rate if you're retired.

I was reminded of this concept (I first read about it in a book by the economist Ravi Batra) by WHT's recent comments on compounding interest. I think that this kind of tax would also act as a curb on long-term massive wealth accumulation.

In the example of the 4,000 SF house vs the 3,000 SF house, do they have a second question asking why people might pick a smaller house rather than a larger house? I asked my dad the question, as it was stated, and he picked the smaller house, because he said the 4,000 foot house was to big, he choose for the reason of the realitive size of the house being smaller, but not because he wanted to lord it over the neighbors.

Know what the study is chosing for I would have picked the 4,000 over the 3,000 because it would send the signal that I don't care about being the underclass guy on the block.

Taking that a step further in relation to all the houses on my parent's block. All of them have been improved, making them bigger. But my parents have stayed with what they have had size wise. Under 850 sqFt.

Just pointing out that some people pick smaller, without thinking about the fact that the house they pick will be the biggest one on the block.

I live on under $9,000 dollars a year and am happy, I even give to others over 70% of that income currently. That will change when all of it will have to go to the tax man, but then I might just pack my bags and go native, and live a nomad lifestyle.

Charles,
BioWebScape designs for a better future.

Hi guys I have been following theoildrum for about a year and a half now although I only recently registered. The best thing about the site is not the articles, but the discussions that follow them. Simply amazing. Coming to the point:
I only have a credible answer to this

4. Any good ideas on how to change our status/aspiration metric away from conspicuous consumption?(this has been asked before but is important enough to throw out to this lateral thinking crew, on occasion).

Abolishing inheritance should solve the above problem and most others. By doing this the person with most skills is rewarded in his life as well as creating same opportunities for the future generations that follow rather than getting shackled by the debt the society owes to that person(and hence his children/beneficiary) due to the accumulated wealth in his lifetime.

Logically since the world has to be a better place for his children to survive in such a setting, people will start working towards better society and the focus "should" shift towards respect/other non materialistic goals.

I think that the four Keirsey termperament sorter personality types offer insight into how people veiw social status
http://www.keirsey.com/handler.aspx?s=keirsey&f=fourtemps&tab=4&c=overview

Guardians (SJs) share the following core characteristics:

* Guardians pride themselves on being dependable, helpful, and hard-working.
* Guardians make loyal mates, responsible parents, and stabilizing leaders.
* Guardians tend to be dutiful, cautious, humble, and focused on credentials and traditions.
* Guardians are concerned citizens who trust authority, join groups, seek security, prize gratitude, and dream of meting out justice.

All Artisans (SPs) share the following core characteristics:

* Artisans tend to be fun-loving, optimistic, realistic, and focused on the here and now
* Artisans pride themselves on being unconventional, bold, and spontaneous.
* Artisans make playful mates, creative parents, and troubleshooting leaders.
* Artisans are excitable, trust their impulses, want to make a splash, seek stimulation, prize freedom, and dream of mastering action skills.

All Idealists (NFs) share the following core characteristics:

* Idealists are enthusiastic, they trust their intuition, yearn for romance, seek their true self, prize meaningful relationships, and dream of attaining wisdom.
* Idealists pride themselves on being loving, kindhearted, and authentic.
* Idealists tend to be giving, trusting, spiritual, and they are focused on personal journeys and human potentials.
* Idealists make intense mates, nurturing parents, and inspirational leaders.

All Rationals (NTs) share the following core characteristics:

* Rationals tend to be pragmatic, skeptical, self-contained, and focused on problem-solving and systems analysis.
* Rationals pride themselves on being ingenious, independent, and strong willed.
* Rationals make reasonable mates, individualizing parents, and strategic leaders.
* Rationals are even-tempered, they trust logic, yearn for achievement, seek knowledge, prize technology, and dream of understanding how the world works.

The Quest Is NOT About Status (yes, another important essay)

I know how much folks here like music, and the musical tastes here are pretty good, so I think you may appreciate this: Lately I have been on a quest for a song that would define the 1990’s. I don’t mean a political song. I mean a song that captured the feel of that priceless decade…the decade when so many of us still felt relatively young, there was talk about “the end of history”, and the discussion was how we would retain cohesion with no threats, no external enemies. Pope John Paul warned that post cold war liberty should mean more than just shopping malls.

I needed a song that depicted the “style”, the feel of the well off trendsetters, the artsy couples and social climbers who draped their lives in sophistication, travel, romances, enjoying what they knew (and this is so rare, to know that a time is a special time) was a rapidly fading era as the years piled up on the prosperous connoisseurs of all the boomer generation had created. And then I found it:

Please no more therapy
Mother take care of me
Piece me together with a
Needle and thread
Wrap me in eiderdown
Lace from your wedding gown
Fold me and lay me down
On your bed
Or liken me to a shoe
Blackened and spit-shined through
Kicking back home to you
Smiling back home
Singing back home to you
Laughing back home to you
Dragging back home to you

I was so wary then
The ugly American
Thinner than oxygen
Tough as a whore
I said you can lie to me
I own what's inside of me
And nothing surprises me anymore
But forests in Germany
Kids in the Tuileries
Broken-down fortresses
In old Italy
And claiming his victory
Shrouded in mystery
He went running away with me

Back in our home New York
Walking these streets forlorn
We all in our uniforms
Black and black
Doing that slouch and jive
The artist must survive
We've got all we need we cried
And we don't look back
Thinking we had it made
Poised for the hit parade
Knee deep in accolades
The conceptual pair
But ever the malcontent
He left without incident
Vanished into thin air

Now I am always amazed
Words can fill up a page
Pages fill up the days
Between him and me
But the vows that we never keep
From bedrooms to business-speak
Make me remember how cheap
Words can be
And the letters I wrote you of
Were those of the desperate stuff
Like begging for love in a suicide threat
But I am too young to die
Too old for a lullaby
Too tired for life on the ledge

But I had a dream last night
Of lovers who walked the plank
Out on the edge of time
Amidst ridicule
They laughed as they rocked and reeled
Over the mining fields
Coming to rest on this ship of fools
But he just took polaroids
Of her smile in the light
Of the dawn of the menacing sky
And before they went overboard
She turned and held up a card
And it said Valentine (Shawn Colvin, “Polariods” 1992
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TumnvSZsuTA

Polariod is gone, Microsoft spell check doesn’t even recognize the brand, and the ship of fools continued sailing on into the threatening sky, one last “Valentine” on the way to old age, before the magnificent songwriter wrote these lines in a recent song…
“I’m gonna die in these four walls…I’ve had enough and I’ve tried it all. I’ll watch the day break and I’ll see the night fall in these four walls.” (Shawn Colvin, “These Four Walls” 2006)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB9NNqUCOa0

Amazing what fourteen years at just the right time in life can do to perceptions is it not?

You may be asking at this point, what does this have to do with the subject of rank and wealth and social status? Take another look at the lyrics above. You will notice that there are no discussions of possessions per se. When looking back, the artist does not talk about cars, clothes, household goods, money in the bank. The status is only a tool to gain something else, and this is the absolute important point to recall.

As radical as it may sound, most people (leaving aside a certain personality type) does not want status, power or even wealth for its own sake. They are all tools for what matters, for what the artist is singing about, for that thing that makes us human.

“Fremont” touches on it in his post up the string beginning with the wonderful line “Who you are is who you think you are. Time is our personal accounting, our narrative of our experience. Try to figure out when you hear your footfall in the dry grass. Always past tense.” So what is it that Fremont is talking about and Shawn Colvin is singing about, the ULTIMATE STATUS items?

All wealth, all status, is to gain that most precious, most transient and most esoteric of things: EXPERIENCES.
Most people do not want to own a Ferrari, but they may want to experience one. It would be too much responsibility to actually own it. Most people do not want to own Paris, they want to experience Paris. Most people do not want to own a luxury penthouse on Park Ave. in New York, but at least for a time they would like to experience it. The list could go on forever, but the point has been made: The goal for most humans is NOT ownership, not wealth, not status, it is the opportunity to experience these things. It is the fear that we may not experience more than we already have that can be called (as some have here on TOD have called it) a ‘collapse of aspirations”.

The recent economic “crisis”, the concern over depleting resources, the worry about climate issues are all tied together, seemingly telling us “you have done all you are going to do”. Most people do not mind being told “you own all your going to since we already have too much junk to look after anyway. But being told you have experience all your going to experience is truly frightening.
There is another issue at work here: Age. The 76 million baby boomers are beginning to really sense their age, and are becoming aware of their mortality. We are realizing that no amount of spa visits, vitamins and health club memberships will change the final outcome, and that outcome is fast approaching.

Just at the time many baby boomers are sensing the limited time left to take opportunity of experiencing all life has to offer, they are being told that life will soon begin to offer less. The boomers last chance for experiences may be taken from them. The sense of loss is palpable. Worse, they can look backward and see what they themselves once were, but to do so they must look to China, India and the developing nations, because it is the youth of other nations who still have the ability to dream and to hope. The American, Japanese and European youth, raised in the shadow of an aging generation are stilted in their power to believe fully in the power of dreaming and acting.

The fortunate ones are the ones who experienced much in their youth: The travel, the loves and affairs, the artistry of poetry and music and the joys of family memories and can retreat peacefully to the shelter of “these four walls” if they are fortunate enough to be able to defend ownership of a home. Even for them, the loss of the “status” of being relevant, of being out there enjoying the experiences of life will be a hard adjustment to make, and an adjustment these people had assumed was still a couple of decades away.

What we boomers must understand, and must be cautious of, is the risk of tangling our own sense of declining status brought on by the reduced opportunities caused by aging with the reduced opportunities brought on by resource depletion and economic issues. These are two separate causes, but are very easy to confuse.

The status we can have, and the only status that has ever really mattered is our collection of experiences. It is the story of humanity. Think of all the literature of all human history…the exploits of the sailors of the Odyssey, the accounts of a warrior king named David, The Epic quest stories of Gilgamesh, the short but daring spiritual quest of a carpenter named Jesus, the epic rise of Mohammed, the tales of a windmill tilter named Don Quixote, and on and on….all accounts of experiences.

What have you not done that you MUST do? Because now is the time, very likely it is your last chance. With or without the financial crisis, with or without resource depletion, for the boomers time is running out. Is the glass half full or half empty? If half the oil is gone, that means half is still there, and your last attempt to experience what you MUST experience will not matter in the great scheme of things, except to you, but it will mean EVERYTHING to you. If you must be relevant to the cause, then promote something…energy efficiency, solar, wind, geothermal, something, if that is an experience that is calling you. Who knows, you may even decide to build something. Not to own it, but to EXPERIENCE it.

The adjustment to declining opportunities must be made, at least for 76 million of us. We cannot abandon our hopes of experiences now, we cannot allow our remaining hopes to be stolen from us. This will be our last fight, the fight we will make for ourselves, for what we want to be before we die, what we know in our hearts we must experience. And the time is short.

Thinking of money, status or power as ends instead of means is a common mistake. The quest is not for wealth or power or status. Let’s keep our eyes on the prize. The quest is for experience.
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At the close of one of the episodes of Ken Burns series “The National Parks, America’s Best Idea” is a bit of prose by a 65 year old traveler and amateur poet named Margaret Gerkhe:

“5:00PM, July 15th: Here I am on this mid-July afternoon going home, and glad to be going home. Surely I care little about home, and never have. Back to Nebraska, to the hateful heat of summer, to work day after day, to monotony most would say. But glad.

This long silver train makes swift passage. It is streaking across the flat Colorado country as I sit here, alone.

Why should I be so near to tears?

The whole trip to Colorado like a dream now: The whole thing drops from my shoulders now, like a jeweled coat, and I lay it aside, feeling I’ve never worn it at all.” (Margaret Gerkhe, 1948)
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It will all be over soon enough, and the jeweled coat will drop away. Enjoy the trip while you can take it and while you can remember it.

RC
Roger Conner Jr.